The Massachusetts Coalition

The Massachusetts Coalition for the Prevention of Medical Errors is a public-private partnership whose mission is to improve patient safety and eliminate medical errors in Massachusetts.

The Coalition's membership includes consumer organizations, state agencies, hospitals, professional associations for physicians, nurses, pharmacists, long-term care, as well as health plans, employers, policymakers, and researchers. The Coalition leverages the efforts of all of these organizations to accomplish the shared goal of improving patient safety. The Coalition promotes a systems-oriented approach to improving patient safety, identifying the causes of medical errors, and developing and supporting implementation of strategies for prevention.

Selected Coalition Accomplishments

Successful Improvement Collaboratives:

An infection prevention collaborative with 100% participation of hospitals in the state.

A collaborative to prevent C. difficile infections which reduced these life-threatening infections 25% among the 27 participating hospitals. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highlighted this success

A collaborative for more than 30 long-term care facilities which reduced over-diagnosis of urinary tract infections by 33%, thus also reducing inappropriate antibiotic use that promotes development of drug-resistant organisms and C. difficile infections.

The National Patient Safety Goals established by the Joint Commission for 2005 for hospitals nationally included new standards for the two topics which were already the focus of statewide patient safety initiatives sponsored by the Coalition and Massachusetts Hospital Association - Reconciling Medications and Communicating Critical Test Results. The safe practices and toolkits for these topics may be found on the Initiatives page.